The Textile Toolbox is a web platform, created by TED for MISTRA Future Fashion, which explores the nexus between sustainability and profitability in the fashion industry.This open website is a global collaborative effort that draws on the expertise of researchers from an array of fashion schools, and it acts as a platform for designers, professionals and students to explore sustainable design, manufacturing, and consumption solutions.

Repair it yourself shoes

To understand the philosophical framework underlying the content housed on the site, click first on the “Approach” navigation link. Here you will find a description of the TED Ten, which are ten design strategies to inspire and drive sustainable innovation. The “Exhibits” section shows these principles in action with links to research and writings, and under “Resources” there is a growing list of well-thought-out lesson plans for all educational levels. The “Writing and Research” link takes you to the Textile Toolbox blog, which consists articles with bibliographies, as well as announcements. One recent announcement of note is an open call to designers to submit sustainable design projects for the Textile Toolbox gallery that follow the the TED Ten.

I can see this wonderful site being used as as a substitution for for a traditional textbook in a class focused on sustainability. The videos, writings, lesson plans and leads to further research make it a rich resource for students, faculty and librarians a like. This is an excellent resource to add to your library’s research guides or pathfinders.

Students often ask me if they will continue to have access to our Library’s wonderful resources after they graduate. The answer, right now, is one of those annoying “yes, but” answers. Alumni of FIT will always have access to the Library itself, and there is a wide array of print and online subscription resources they can have access to when they visit. However, most of our higher-end, industry-level databases – market research and fashion forecasting services – are off limits.

The designer and the scientist have a lot more in common as researchers than most people might think. Design research involves observation, note-taking, collecting samples, categorizing & recognizing patterns, and experimenting with materials.

Of course, there are marked differences between the scientist and the designer as researchers, too. There is no rigorous, codified “method” for all designers or artists, who have greater liberty than scientists to come up with their own approaches. Design research is also much more heavily reliant on access to visual resources than scientific research. Moreover, there are many in the design fields who eschew what they refer to as “scientism” in the design research process (see this Atlantic article for more on that topic)

Librarians are not alone in being stereotyped. People involved in fashion generally get written-off as shallow and lacking intellectual interests. While fashion folk certainly delight in the temporal and aesthetic, it is misguided to assume they lack interests that go deeper than the surface. Moreover, the contributions of fashion to our culture, economy and social history should never be dismissed. To do so, in the words of Miranda Priestly, is sort of comical.So what are these common misconceptions?

Libraries without Borders asked French designer Philippe Starck to create a pop-up library to serve refugees from the Congo. What he and his team came up is a beautiful, functional set of information treasure chests called the Ideas Box.

Each set is comprised of four boxes – Connect, Learn, Play and Create -which contain among other things: 15 tablets and 4 laptops (internet connected), 50 e-readers and 5000 ebooks, 250 hardcopy books, a cinema modale, 5 HD cameras, board games, videos, craft materials and more. Tents and tables are also included.

Our response to color is almost primal. Color can make us desire something or recoil from it. Color as symbol is an admixture of culturally rooted meaning and deeply personal experience, and it is always evolving. Yet color is perceived differently and with varying subtly by each of us. In fact, it is all in our heads – it’s our brains that give objects color. For all these reasons and more, using words to talk about color, or to search for it on the web, or to communicate it to another person can be very, very difficult. Which is ironic fitting, as color itself can communication much more than words can say.

Color by Number

Munsell Color Tree

Over time, various systems have been devised to describe color for the purposes of understanding its power, for pigment mixing, printing, color matching and most recently web design. Of the systems still in use today, like Munsell, Pantone, CMYK, RGB, and Hexadecimal, many can be used to search for color online, too. The following online tools use color systems for discovery and creation.

Find images by color or palette

TinEye Labs – Multicolr Search Engine Allows users to click colors on a palette and uses the hexadecimal system to retrieve Creative Commons images from Flickr. Provides users with the hexadecimal number of the colors they have chosen.Copper Hewitt Museum – Our collection by colorLike the TinEye search, users can click on colors from a square palette and the search uses the hexadecimal system to retrieve matches (or near matches) from the museums extensive collection of textiles, posters, and other design & decorative arts items.Hermitage Museum – Search by Color and Color LayoutThe former palace of the Russian Czars, The Hermitage is one of the world’s grandest and greatest art museums. Teaming with IBM you can now search their collection by color and multi-color layout. кру́то!

Create and find palettes from a color or from an image

Color HunterColor Hunter is a website where you can find and make color palettes created from images.To find color palettes on Color Hunter, enter a search term in the box at the top of the page. You can search by tag or hex color code or image URL. If you have an image or image url, you can upload it and get a color palette based on the colors in the image.ColorMunkiThe makers of the ColorMunki spectrometer have created an online color palette creation tool, which give users access to both the Munsell and Pantone systems. You can also brown photo generated palettes and user generated, and when you click on the color chip it will find a match in Munsell or Pantone!COLOURLoversCOLOURlovers is a social network, as well as a place to find tools for create and sharie color palettes, seamless patterns, and palettes from from photo graphs. Registration is required for access to some of the tools

Color ‘n Books (including coloring books)

If you want to find books about a specific color or about color in general, chances are that you would like a expert overview about the history, symbolism, or use of color in a certain fields, Here are some hints for searching our catalog (or any library catalog) with some precision.

If you are still getting a lot of false hits, try searching for your words in the Subject Headings of the catalog, instead of searching everything. This will go a long way to eliminate off-topic books, like Green is the New Black or Famous for Fifteen Minutes by Ultra Violet, which have little or nothing to do with color.

Think of alternate terms that relate to color. Books about Pigment or Dyes might not have the word color in the title or subject, but might still be very relevant. Books about Trend Forecasting definitely will have great information about color trend cycles.

And, yes, we do have coloring books . . . and we also have scanners and photocopy machines. Just sayin’

Rescheduled for March 14th at 3:00 PM in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre.

On February 28th at 3:00 PM, FIT students and faculty are invited to a Love Your Library 2014 interview with Marion Fasel, jewelry author, expert and journalist. As the person interviewing her, I have to admit that I’m more than a little nervous. Not only is Marion Fasel incredibly accomplished, she’s also an old friend. Somehow this makes the task all the more daunting.

I’ve known Marion since childhood. Our families attended the same church. We went to the same high school. We even briefly shared a BFF, believe it or not. But It was in New York City, after about five years of my moving here that our current friendship really began. I was working at St. Martin’s Press in Flatiron building and was visiting a friend for lunch, who worked close by at the soon-to-be-gone Bettman Photo Archives (but that’s another story). Afraid of being late for a meeting, I was scurrying out of the Bettman offices when whom should I run into but Marion, whom I hadn’t seen since my first days in the city. She was there to do image research, as it turned out. She and her writing partner, Penny Proddow, were putting the finishing touches on a book, Diamonds: A Century of Spectacular Jewels, which would be published the next year. I remember being so impressed. Working in the publishing, rather than the writing end of things, I knew how hard it was to get a book contract. And this was to be Marion’s second. We were both in hurry, so we quickly exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together. And we did. And we still do.

Over the years, through all manner of ups and downs, Marion has been a good and constant friend. In fact, when I think about Marion, the first thing I think of is what truly decent and delightfully genuine person she is. I don’t think automatically think about the accomplishments. Could it be that this is why I feel a little less than ready to interview her about her career? In preparation for the Love Your Library event, I have been researching my friend as a writer, journalist and fine jewelry expert. It has been quite interesting to learn about things that she has done, which she justifiably could have bragged about, but which she has never divulged or volunteered in our conversations. I was not surprised, however, to see one blog describe her as the “kindest most joyful jewelry journalist.” Kindness? Joy? In the fashion industry? In the magazine business? You bet. Perhaps, that’s the secret to her success.

The interview will cover how she started in the industry, what inspires and motivates her as a writer, her views on contemporary jewelers and jewelry trends, the future of fashion journalism, and time permitting, questions from the audience. I hope to learn a lot. Please come, because I think you will learn a lot, too.

Marion Fasel has been the Contributing Editor of Fine Jewelry and Watches atInStyle for over fifteen years. She has also authored or co-authored seven books about twentieth century jewelry design history. For a list of books in the FIT Library’s collection authored by Marion Fasel, click here.

Locating specific articles and images from pre-1970’s fashion and “women’s interest” periodicals can be difficult. Many of these magazines were given late or spotty coverage by the big publishing companies that provided periodical indexes to libraries (precursors to library databases). For instance, it wasn’t until the mid-1950’s that the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature began selective coverage of some women’s magazines: Vogue, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s and the like. The coverage was far from comprehensive and not especially good for image research. Harper’s Bazaar didn’t get picked up until the early 1970’s and Women’s Wear Daily, was largely ignored by all indexers until the late 1970’s. As a result, if you wanted to find something specific – like an early Irving Penn photo in its original editorial context or a society article about the Marchesa Cassati -you either had to browse through issue after issue, or hope to find a reference in a secondary source such as a book.

That’s why the 2011 launch of the Vogue Archive online — with its full-text, full-image coverage of every page of Vogue from 1892 to the present — revolutionized the way the research is conducted the area of fashion history (and popular culture, photography, illustration, communication design, etc).

But what about all the other influential magazines from across the decades and around the world? Well, FIT Library’s subscription to General OneFile will let you to search for articles (text only) from many fashion and women’s interest magazines back into the 1980s or 90s, but if you need anything earlier little has changed.

So if you’re looking for Women’s Wear Daily articles about Nan Kempner lunching with Chessy Rayner, or if you’re hoping to find Warhol’s fashion illustrations as they originally appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, you might find yourself asking, “How do I look when it’s not in Vogue?”

Three Tips for “Looking Good”

1 . Do some informed browsing

The Educated Guess. Whether you’re looking for images, advertisements or textual information, remember that certain topics are going to get better coverage during certain times of the year or (in the case of newspapers) during certain days of the week. Just knowing a little something about a magazine’s intended audience and what might interest them seasonally can be a good place to get started. For example: If you’re looking for swimwear images from a particular decade in a magazine intended for a general female audience, you might ask to see the June or July issues. However, if the magazine is aimed toward individuals the fashion industry, you will likely find previews of summer swimwear in spring issues.

The Editorial Calendar. Along with making your best guess, you should be aware the most magazines and newspapers have “editorial calendars”. For magazines these calendars might vary slightly or broadly from year to year depending. But for many daily newspapers the weekly calendar is adhered to strictly decade after decade.

Therefore, when a researcher came to the reference desk recently looking for information on a lesser-known handbag designer from the late 60s and early 70s who specialized in canvas totes, she was told to browse the spring 1969 to 1971 Monday issues for previews of summer accessories.

Finding current editorial calendar for magazines is pretty easy and can give you insights into what past calendars may have been like. Simply search the web with the name of the magazine and the words “editorial calendar.” If that doesn’t work, look for

the magazine’s media kit. Here are examples of how widely editorial calendars can vary based on the intended audience.

You may want to get yourself a New York Public Library card to search for content earlier than 1980 or for content from foreign publications. The two databases below, both accessible from NYPL.org, should be used in conjunction with our print magazine holdings, as they will not necessarily provide you with page images or .pdf files of the articles they retrieve.

The FIT Library owns the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature in print format, but the New York Public Library provides online access to the Readers Guide Retrospective database which is much more comprehensive in its coverage than its print counterpart (click to see title list and date coverage). and includes Harper’s Bazaar from 1899-1982 & Mademoiselle from 1953-1982.

We used to subscribe to Design and Applied Arts Index until quite recently, but budget matters forced us to drop it. Like Readers’ Guide Retrospective, however, it is available online from the New York Public Library. It provides indexing coverage of Elle UK, Vogue UK and other foreign fashion magazines (no full-text articles).

3. Free magazine archives on the web

Historical magazine content is increasingly available for free online, but the quality of the images and the accuracy of search vary greatly from archive to archive. Coverage is also very spotting. The following are some of my favorite online archives, because they provide excellent indexing, full-text or/and full-image access to “womens’ interest” magazines.

This amazing online archive allows you to browse and search a wide range of materials related to home economics. In the listing of journals you will find Harper’s Bazaar 1867-1900 and Good Housekeeping 1885-1950.

HathiTrust is collection of millions of titles digitized from academic libraries around the world. To locate and exclusively search the contents of fashion or women’s interest magazines, forego using the “full-text” search. Instead, click on the “catalog” search tab and search for either “fashion periodicals” or “women periodicals” in the Subject field.

Titles include: La Moda elegante ilustrada, Woman’s Home Companion, and Repository of arts, literature, fashions. Dates of holdings vary widely, but the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are well covered

French fashion magazines publishing house, Les Editions Jalou, made the bold and generous decision to make the archives of all their magazines either fully or partially available, including L’Officiel de la Mode 1921-2013 and L’Art et la Mode 1883-1965. The magazines can be searched and browsed by decade. Pages can be printed out but not downloaded. Thisvideo illustrates how the browsing feature works.

Ebonymagazine 1950-2008 can be accessed from Google Books, as can Elle Girl 2001-2007, Working Mother, 1978-2008, and other general interest magazines.

Leave no page unturned! My suggestion is that you give all of these options a try and certainly don’t cheat yourself out of the experience of looking through our older magazines. And if you ever need any help, come by the reference desk on the 4th floor of the FIT Library or contact us via our Ask a Librarian services.